The biblical story describes how David disguised himself as a fool, drooled onto his beard and pretended to be mad to escape from Akhish, king of Gath. David's act was so convincing, in fact, that Akhish told his servants to get that "crazy man" out of there, and asked the question that later became a common saying in these parts: "Do I have any shortage of madmen-"
Professor Eliezer Witztum and Dr. Moshe Kalian, both highly renowned psychiatrists who have been studying our lives here for several decades, deal in a "real" madness that is linked to the city of King David. For many years, they have treated thousands of patients suffering from various kinds of mental illness or exhaustion. Their latest book, "Yerushalayim Shel Kedusha Veshigaon" ("Jerusalem of Holiness and Madness," published in Hebrew by Aryeh Nir Publishers), deals with pilgrims, tourists, visionaries and dreamers who lost their grip on sanity when they came to Jerusalem.
The story of these visionaries is the story of the gap between Jerusalem of day-to-day life and Jerusalem the holy city, the celestial Jerusalem, and the visions of redemption that are linked with it. The discrepancy between the earthly and the supernal causes a mental crisis. In the medical literature, the crisis has a name: Jerusalem Syndrome, a disease whose symptoms are varied and bizarre.
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The story is told of a tourist from the United States who offered an antiquities dealer his suit and his clothing in exchange for a large and magnificent sword. Thinking the offer a joke, the well-mannered proprietor said with a smile: "Go ahead." To his amazement, the tourist took off all his clothes, grabbed the sword and ran along David Street in the Old City shouting: "Make way for King David, the Messiah!" When he reached Jaffa Gate, it took several police officers to subdue him before he was taken to a psychiatric hospital for observation.
Witztum and Kalian have met many patients in the same situation. The phenomenon intrigued them, and they found that Jerusalem was not the only city that engendered strong emotions, to the point of insanity and even death. The syndrome involves a combination of extremely strong emotions, usually in people with a background of mental illness, and holy or special sites, magnificent landscapes or particularly inspiring works of art. Other similar syndromes have names such as Stendhal Syndrome in Florence, White House Syndrome in Washington, or the syndrome known as Death in Venice, in which people come to that city to take their own lives.
Kalian and Witztum found that these phenomena, in the world in general and in Jerusalem in particular, are not new; they go back many years. Witztum, a senior psychiatrist at the Beersheba Mental Health Center and the mental health department at Sarah Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem, says, "Various places in the world have a certain representative consciousness in our brains. The major characteristics of Florence are beauty and aesthetics. In the White House, the major characteristics are power and grandiosity. In Venice, it is a feeling of romantic falling. That's psycho-geography. In Jerusalem, the major characteristics in our representative consciousness are holiness and redemption. What makes Jerusalem special, of course, is that it is sacred to three religions."
The mission: becoming a king
Witztum and Kalian investigated men and women from various generations who came to Jerusalem because of messianic visions or in search of their identity. The most dangerous of them were those who tried to blow up the Temple Mount "to bring redemption to the world."
Kalian, who is Jerusalem's district psychologist, and Witztum read hundreds of cases, interviews and documents on people who suffered from these syndromes, and mainly Jerusalem Syndrome. They met with many of them personally as part of their research. The result, as it appears in the book, is a fascinating spiritual, anthropological and historical journey into the minds of these people. Yet often, the main character in the story is Jerusalem itself, as it is reflected in the consciousness of those who visit it, in their experiences and the effect it had on them from the moment they saw its landscapes and their feet touched its ground.
The first of the "dangerous" patients was Denis Michael Rohan, a young Christian man from Australia. On Aug. 21, 1969, he tried to set fire to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, eliciting the anger of millions of Muslims the world over. To this day, Israel is blamed, groundlessly, for having been behind Rohan's act of attempted arson.
Witztum and Kalian found that Rohan had had a difficult childhood. He had suffered physical abuse and had done poorly in school -- he was left back a grade and placed in a program for children with learning disabilities. Later, he got into trouble with the law and spent several years in a reform facility for juvenile offenders. He married at 22, but his marriage fell apart two years later. After that he experienced his first divine revelation. That same year, he underwent a severe mental crisis, took pills and overturned the car he was driving. After spending several months in a psychiatric hospital, he immersed himself in religious study and "understood" that he had been given a messianic mission: "to build the Temple and become a king."
Rohan found confirmation of his mission in various verses and publications of a Christian organization called the Worldwide Church of God. When he came to Israel in March 1969, he began studying Hebrew in an intensive program on Kibbutz Mishmar Hasharon and continued to experience "divine signs" that convinced him that "God intended him to rule Jerusalem and Judea and that he must burn down the Al-Aqsa Mosque and build a temple to Jesus in its place."
Rohan got into the mosque by bribing one of the guards there, telling him that he wanted to photograph the mosque from inside without interference. After he was captured and put on trial, his inner world, full of hallucinations and voices, was revealed. Adopting the opinions of mental health professionals and experts who testified on behalf of the defense, the court ruled that Rohan had acted on an uncontrollable impulse that stemmed from his mental illness. He was hospitalized in a mental institution and in 1974 he was deported to Australia, where he remained hospitalized until his death in 1995.
Sixteen years after Rohan's act, on April 11, 1982, Alan Goodman went on a shooting rampage on the Temple Mount, using the M-16 rifle he had received during basic training, murdering a Waqf security guard and wounding four others. Goodman had a problematic background of a different kind. He got into trouble emotionally in his relationships with women, and before he perpetrated the attack, he had obsessive thoughts of revenge against Arabs because of the horrific terror attacks that Arabs had committed at the time.
Goodman's trial, like Rohan's, centered around his sanity. While the court felt he suffered from severe personality disturbances, it ruled that his acts on the Temple Mount had not stemmed from an uncontrollable impulse. His crime also sparked rioting and incitement against Israel throughout the Muslim world. In October 1997, after having served 15 years of a life sentence, Goodman was deported to the U.S.
The third incident in which the mosques on the Temple Mount were the object of attack, and in which people of dubious sanity were involved, took place on a rainy winter night in 1984 when a group that would later be known as the Lifta Gang plotted to blow up the Temple Mount. The Lifta Gang was well on its way to accomplishing its goal. It was only by coincidence that a Waqf security guard noticed them and blew his whistle.
The members of the conspiracy fled, their identities unknown. When day broke, police officers were shocked to discover a huge quantity of explosives and weapons at the foot of the Dome of the Rock.
When the gang members' identities were discovered, it turned out that their act was ideologically motivated. Shimon Barda, a man with a rich criminal background who became religiously observant, had befriended Uzi Mahsiya Ha'elyon and Yehuda Limai, two odd people imbued with strong messianic faith, who had founded the Bnei Yehuda cult. Ha'elyon and Limai were found to be mentally ill and thus not responsible for their actions.
Kalian and Witztum write that the gang was noted for a combination of crime, religion, messianism and severe psychopathology. Barda learned of the history of the Temple Mount and the Temple when he visited the Lubavitcher rebbe's headquarters in Brooklyn. Christian writings were also found among the belongings of one of the other gang members. Barda shared his own abilities with the Lifta Gang in an effort to fulfill the messianic visions of Limai and Ha'elyon.
On one of the lookout points that the three men used to watch the Temple Mount, from the roof of the Intercontinental Hotel on the Mount of Olives, Ha'elyon and Limai compared the domes on the Temple Mount to two foreskins that had to be removed. On the same occasion, Barda said that the mosques had to be hit hard, while Ha'elyon hinted that the Messiah was already among them "and he is one of the wise who understand the wisdom of God." He also said, "All the secrets and the keys to calculating the time of the Redemption are hidden at the end of the book of Daniel."
The many acts of Palestinian terror that took place in downtown Jerusalem at the time made the members of Bnei Yehuda fear for the future of the Jewish people and gave them a feeling that the end was near. Their "solution" was to blow up the mosques, removing them from the sacred site.
'A lofty mission'
Did Witztum and Kalian learn of other plots to attack the Temple Mount as part of their work? The book gives no answer. Kalian says no, but Witztum remembers one such incident, which he calls "the soldier of the apocalypse."
"This was a mentally disturbed man whom I met in the early 1990s. He stopped having hallucinations once he started receiving treatment, and I was also assisted by a great rabbinic personality, whose identity I must also keep confidential. It is completely clear that if I had encountered a case of clear and present danger to the Temple Mount, I would have brought it to the police.
Kalian and Witztum say that the threats to the Temple Mount over the years, which were the work of mentally disturbed people, illustrate the various shades of the dangerous concoction that includes elements of messianism, fanatical ideology, severe personality disturbance, criminal tendencies and mental illness.
Kalian: "Most people who suffer from Jerusalem Syndrome fell ill with severe mental disturbances even before then. Some of them heard voices or saw visions, and a few experienced 'divine enlightenment' and received instructions to act and a call to go to Jerusalem."
Both senior psychiatrists say that the phenomenon existed in previous generations as well. The pilgrimage literature is full of descriptions of people who visited for religious reasons who lost their mental balance when they arrived in Jerusalem and suddenly saw themselves as important historical or religious figures.
Saint Rainerius, a medieval Italian cheese merchant who became a monk in Jerusalem and later the patron saint of Pisa, his birthplace, was attending Christmas mass in a church in Tyre when he heard the bishop telling the worshippers that "the image of the Son of God is among the congregation."
Convinced that the bishop was referring to him, Rainerius had a vision in which Jesus ordered him to give up all his property, undress and remain nude on the anniversary of the day Jesus was stripped for his crucifixion. "During one vision he had while praying in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, his body began to emit a pleasant fragrance, and later on he noticed a small white dove hovering near his right ear that he felt was the Holy Spirit."
George Gatt (1843-1924), an Austrian priest who worked in Jerusalem and in other places in the Land of Israel, also wrote in one of his books about tourists who behaved oddly, including a Polish tourist who claimed to be Elijah the Prophet. On Easter Day in 1873, this tourist, dressed in white, climbed to a chapel on the Mount of Olives and addressed the patriarch of Jerusalem firmly, telling him of his "lofty mission."
Another visitor, who claimed to be the prophet Daniel, had also received a call to leave the U.S. and go to the Holy Land. This literature introduces us to a whole gallery of characters, visionaries who suffered profound mental disturbances. All thought they had been singled out or chosen, or were the reincarnations of important figures who had been given an exalted mission to carry out.
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The cases Witztum and Kalian encountered are fairly similar to the ones in the pilgrimage literature. "Jeff," an American tourist in his 30s, was brought to a mental hospital by police after suffering a violent outbreak in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Jeff tried to smash objects and icons, throw crosses and destroy the place, saying, "Believers in God are forbidden to engage in idol worship."
Rahina, a single woman from the Philippines, was convinced that she had become pregnant by Satan. Tobias, a Dutch man in his 50s who claimed to be the "new Messiah," was taken to a psychiatric hospital in a state of dehydration and severe physical exhaustion.
In their book, Witztum and Kalian give a place of honor to psycho-geography, from Paris to Venice. But Kalian says, "Healthy people usually do not suffer from Jerusalem Syndrome. Those who suffer from it are usually people who have a history of mental illness, for whom being in Jerusalem acts as a catalyst for an outbreak of one kind or another."
Witztum and Kalian quote Dr. Haim Herman, a pioneer of psychiatry in the Land of Israel, who wrote about Jerusalem Syndrome in the 1930s: "Jerusalem is a magnet for impassioned believers of many religions and varied religious sects. In its streets may be found the saviors of the world, messiahs, redeemers of human beings from their troubles and local prophets."
Perhaps to emphasize the unique nature of Jerusalem, Witztum echoes Herman's sentiment: "It is often difficult to distinguish between the pathological and the normal psyche even in normal situations, but in Jerusalem, it is twice as hard."
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